Job Description
We are looking for Trustees, including a new Chair of Trustees.
Working for Gardeners ( Working for Gardeners ) is a registered Charity and membership organisation dedicated to practical horticultural training and advancing the interests of gardeners and horticulturists across the UK.
We have an active community of around 1500 members, exchanging practical horticultural knowledge and interest. Many of our members are of course also members of other horticultural institutions such as the RHS, and see Working for Gardeners as a complementary source of hands-in-the-soil community and further training.
We collaborate with an evolving network of significant private and public gardens across the UK to offer practical experience through one-day specialist workshops and through year-long paid placements for aspiring gardeners under our well-respected professional development programme, the Work and Retrain as a Gardener (WRAG) Scheme.
Our Financial Position
Our Charity is in good financial health, with decent cash reserves and fairly balanced revenue streams, mainly from membership subscriptions, our practical workshop and skills programme and from the WRAG Scheme. We also have a small number of generous donors, and are looking to develop this support further.
Our Charity's direct annual revenue is around £200,000 and we operate typically close to break-even, with a small central office team based in South Gloucestershire and a 20-strong UK-wide paid, part-time team across the UK who promote and manage our relationships with garden partners and our membership community. However, our financial footprint is more in the region of £1.3 million, taking account of the annual income (at national living wage) paid to our WRAG Scheme trainees under the garden placements that we organise with our partner gardens.
Given the strong demand for our WRAG Scheme traineeships and indeed across our practical horticultural workshops, we are looking to expand the depth of our reach across Great Britain, including through developing a greater bursary scheme. We are currently investing in the underpinnings for this careful expansion, including upgrading and finetuning our branding, marketing, web, and IT systems.
Role of Chair of Trustees
As Chair, you will provide strong strategic and hands-on leadership across the Charity, marshalling our team to fulfil our educational mission and representing our Charity to the broader community. This is a voluntary position that requires commitment, vision, and strong leadership skills. Our Chair and trustees tend to be quite hands-on, working closely with our Executive Officer and our office and Regional Manager team across the UK.
Key Responsibilities of our Chair
- Chair our small Board of 5-6 pro bono trustees, ensuring effective governance and compliance with relevant legislation and best practice.
- Ensure clear multi-year vision and strong execution of our rolling plan, working with our other trustees and Executive Officer.
- In conjunction with our Treasurer, provide regular guidance to our Executive Officer, who is responsible for the day-to-day execution of our multi-year strategic plan and budget.
- Be our primary spokesperson and ambassador, building our profile and relationships with our membership, garden partners, donors, horticultural sector, media and other key stakeholders more broadly.
- This Chair role will typically require commitment of 3-5 hours per week across regular guidance for our Executive Officer, Board meetings and external representation. The initial term is for 3 years, with a further 3 years possible.
Ideal Profile of Chair
We are looking for a Chair who is, or has enjoyed being, a respected and energetic leader with a strong strategic mindset, not afraid to roll up their sleeves when needed, and comfortable in an organisation of our scale even if they have worked in larger organisations. The ideal candidate will definitely have a keen interest in horticulture, whether personally or professionally, and will probably have a decent network of contacts and profile in gardening, horticultural, or professional services sectors. They will likely have some experience with chairing boards, committees, or similar governance bodies whether in the not-for-profit, corporate, or public sector, and a good understanding of charity governance and trustee responsibilities. Experience in fundraising and marketing would be a plus.
Ideal Profile of Other Trustees
Our current trustees all live and breathe a great passion for things horticultural in a broad sense, including continuing education in our sector, but also bring a great variety of professional and personal backgrounds to the table - in further education; international finance; politics; gardening and flower farming; marketing; HR and other areas of business and charities. We are looking to enhance this diversity and collaborative enthusiasm, ideally bringing deeper experience particularly in areas of marketing and fundraising.
How to Apply (Deadline: Friday 5th June 2026)
If you would love to join our enthusiastic group of trustees given your talents and interests, please submit to our current Chair with a covering letter explaining your motivation and relevant experience, including your CV or similar profile and indicating clearly whether you would also like to assume the Chair role. We would hope to appoint our new Chair and trustees within the next 2-3 months.
Working for Gardeners is committed to diversity and inclusion. We welcome applications from candidates of all backgrounds and particularly encourage applications from underrepresented groups.
Our Story
Founded in 1899 as the Women's Farm and Garden Association, our Charity's original focus was on addressing the lack of education and employment opportunities for women working on the land.
Membership was initially only open to women with a keen interest in the land, farming, gardening and allied industries. Many of our founder members were professional women working in education, gardening, farming and small holdings. The Association set about establishing training courses and examinations, with an Employment Bureau offering a service for both employers and employees.
At the outbreak of the First World War, we responded to the shortage of labour on the land by launching the 'Women's National Land Service Corps' to offer work placements to women, both rural and urban. The success of this movement soon saw it outgrow a small but plucky voluntary organisation and the Government stepped in - the first Women's Land Army was born.
Between the wars, against the backdrop of difficult years of recession, we worked hard to improve the working conditions and status of women in land work and to open up employment training opportunities. We launched a significant training scheme for practical horticultural skills during the Second World War and subsequently extended this to initiate a Garden Apprentice Scheme specifically for school leavers - which led to the development of Government Youth Training Schemes. Throughout this time, the Association exhibited at many agricultural and horticultural shows, promoting the need for training and giving out information and career guidance.
In 1993, we established the 'Women Returners to Amenity Gardening Scheme' to offer more mature students, often career changers or 'returners' who were considering a career in horticulture, training in practical gardening skills within private and public gardens throughout the United Kingdom. In 2014, we updated the name to 'Work and Retrain As a Gardener', reflecting the broader audience that had developed.
Our WRAG Scheme is now established as one of the UK's leading practical gardening training schemes, highly respected by the horticultural sector. Each year, we place around 150 aspiring gardeners, mainly career changers, in wonderful gardens across the UK where the skilled owners or their head gardeners have the expertise to offer practical paid experience and training for 1 or 2 years. Many of these trainees are lucky enough to form strong relationships with their team in these gardens and are offered ongoing employment, while many others go on to other roles in horticulture or set up their own gardening businesses. Quite a few of our gardens take on new WRAG Scheme trainees each year. All of this makes us very happy, but it does mean that we continually need to bring new gardens into our community, and we have considerable waiting lists of trainees in most regions in Britain. Our main imperative is to therefore build more and deeper ongoing partnerships with significant gardens across the UK that can offer the breadth of hands-in-the
